1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a recording medium identifying device in which a package containing one disk or a plurality of disks such as CD, CD-ROM, DVD, PD, etc., or a package containing a built-in recording means other than the disk, is mounted to the body of the device.
2. Description of the Prior Art
There have been proposed various kinds of optical disk media. For example, disk media of pit-modulation system are CD (Compact Disk), CD-ROM (CD-Read Only Memory), and CD-R (CD-Rewritable) which allows only one time of recording. Also, a phase-modulation type recordable/reproduceable medium is a PD (Power Disk), and recordable/reproduceable media of photo electromagnetic system are MO (Magneto-Optical Memory), and HS (Hyper Storage). Furthermore, large-capacity disks for audio system, video system, and computer data, are DVD-ROM (Digital Versatile Disk) of pit-modulation system, and recordable/reproduceable DVD-RAM (DVD-Random Access Memory) of phase-modulation system. Also there is a photo electromagnetic recordable/reproduceable minidisk for use in audio systems and computers.
As a disk unit for driving the above-described disks there are a system in which a single disk, any one of the abovedescribed disks, is mounted, and a system in which a plurality of disks of the same type are mounted and one of these disks mounted is selected and driven.
Furthermore, there has recently been proposed such a disk unit that has a disk driving means capable of driving both CD and DVD, that is, is capable of accommodating both CD and DVD.
The above-described disk unit capable of accommodating different types of disks, however, is mainly designed to mount CD or DVD separately one by one, and not to mount different types of disks at the same time. Particularly, it has not been taken into consideration to adopt such a combination that allows mounting both a playback-only disk and a recordable disk at the same time in one disk unit, for instance a combination of CD or CD-ROM and DVD-RAM, or a combination of DVD-ROM and DVD-RAM. Considering the diversity of future utilization of the optical disk media, diversification of computer software, and an increase in the capacity of data demanded, the advent of a disk unit capable of mounting different types of disks at the same time is desired.
In the disk unit designed to separately mount different types of conventional disks, such as CD and DVD, the type of the disks mounted is determined by reading TOC data of the disks by means of an optical head, or by detecting a difference in thickness from the surface of the disk cover to the recording surface, or by detecting track density. Therefore, there is the problem that it takes much time to determine the type of a disk after mounting and further till transfer to reproducing operation.
Furthermore, in a disk unit designed to accommodate both a playback-only disk such as DVD-ROM and a recordable disk such as DVD-RAM, if there takes place an error in deciding the type of the disks mounted in the disk unit, the DVD-ROM will be mistaken as DVD-RAM. Therefore it can be predicted that there will occur such a problem that a laser power for recording will be given to the DVD-ROM, crashing data stored in the DVD-ROM.
It is, therefore, necessary to identify, on the device body side, whether a plurality of disks mounted are of a RAM or ROM system when the disks are mounted. For instance, when a disk package containing a plurality of disks and provided, on the outside face, with a disk identification section for identifying the disks inside, is mounted in the device body, it is necessary to detect the disk identification section by means of a detecting arm provided on the device body.
In this case, however, if the detecting arm is constantly pressed towards the package mounting area, the detecting arm will slide on the outside face of the package when the package is inserted, resulting in an increased load at the time of package insertion. Besides, the detecting arm contacts the package every time the package is inserted and taken out, with the result that the detecting arm will get fatigued, being broken at the time of package insertion.
The above-described problem of the identifying device arises similarly not only in a disk package but a tape package, and further in a package containing a single or a plurality of memory elements, and provided with a detecting portion on the outside face with which a detecting arm on the device side will contact.